The Stakes Is High: Mourning St. Paul's College

In 1996, De La Soul released an album with the header "The Stakes Is High."  After learning recently that yet another HBCU is unable to keep its doors open, I am reminded of some of the lyrics in the De La Soul's title track, "Let me tell you what it's all about, a skin not considered equal. A meteor has more right than my people."  This line in itself is compelling in Hip-Hop as lyrics like the fore-mentioned are now the stuff of archives, replaced for things that proceed from the mouth of Drake.  But if we are "starting from the bottom, and now we here," its time to reflect on where we might be.  If this "here" is better, than once was, we might not be paying attention to all that is around us because the stakes "is" high when we see the dismal state of resources for HBCUs in comparison to their colleagues - PWIs.  Even from African Americans, there seems to be an inability to grasp the simple importance of closing schools that create access in the wake of the ever developing prison industrial complex.  This simple truth seems to be lost as I hear my colleagues rationalize that every HBCU failure is a result of mis-managment of funds, lack of alumni support, unprepared students/faculty and poor leadership.  While I would never want to underestimate those particular variables, I often have to remind my colleagues that HBCU inequities are also influenced by the hand of institutional racism that smack the face of places like St. Paul's College.  

What I'm simply saying is that the inability to have the same access to the resources that PWIs have been getting all along compounds HBCUs problems.  Many intentional governmental policies have crippled the kinds of work that HBCUs could do. Secondly, the mass exodus of black intellectuals/students to PWI space with the mindset that what we are getting is superior to the inferior "little black school down the street," is yet another major ontological hurdle.  And if that's not enough, there seems to be no intentional resources for educating capable students from low income socioeconomic backgrounds, and for those schools who seek to make that the heart of their mission (even though we all agree that wealth and education go hand in hand).  Beloved, there is no money for education...but there seems to be "plenty money" for incarceration. Seventeen years later, De La Soul is still right, "The Stakes Is High."

HBCUs suffer because the stakes are high, and we are unaware of the work that they do and have done.  We are unaware that they are most likely to produce Black scientists of all sorts.  We are unaware that many of these schools create the next set of educators for public schools.  We are woefully unaware that these schools nurture artists, activists, and entrepreneurs from a vantage point of history, culture, and hope.   We are are unaware of how we all benefit from St. Paul, Tougaloo, Rust, Paine, Meharry, and Livingstone's legacies.  The deficiency really isn't about any of these schools, the deficiency lies with a world community who believes that what was bequeathed to us by our ancestors is inferior in a world filled with "superior" options.  And now I'm back to something that my pastor Otis Moss, III said to a congregation a few years back: "You can't want your child to be a black doctor, and not patron black doctors because you think of them as inferior."  This is exactly the conundrum of HBCUs in a world community. 

Recently a colleague who runs a Black organization said to me casually about the HBCU, "Sean, we should just close these schools down, and just make them really good high schools."  I looked at that colleague, and said, "You know, I bet that someone is saying the same thing about the organization you run."  All of that is to say that if even people who run/administer/preside over all things black don't see the need in what an HBCU can do, we don't just have an external problem...we have an internal one as well.  The STAKES IS HIGH!